A French appeals court on Thursday found Airbus and Air France guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the Rio-Paris plane crash, but a 17-year legal battle over the country’s worst air disaster is expected to continue.
“Justice has absolutely been done,” Daniele Lamy, president of victims’ association AF447, whose son was among the 228 people who died in the accident, told the courtroom.
Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 plunged into pitch darkness into the Atlantic during an equatorial storm on June 1, 2009, listened to the verdict in silence.
By 2023, a lower court had exonerated the two French companies, both of which repeatedly denied the accusations.
Thursday’s verdict constitutes the last stage of a legal marathon involving the relatives of the victims, mainly French, Brazilian and German, and two of the most emblematic French companies.
The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, 225,000 euros ($261,720), following prosecutors’ request during last year’s eight-week trial.
The fines, which represent just a few minutes of either company’s turnover, were widely seen as a symbolic punishment, but the families said the company’s reputation was at stake.
Airbus and Air France both announced they would appeal to France’s highest court, ignoring requests from relatives.
“There is no human, moral or legal justification to continue with this procedure,” said Lamy, who called on both companies to end what she called “procedural harassment.”
Divisions on the cause of the accident
Lawyers anticipated further appeals on legal points and warned that could potentially drag out the process for years.
The families’ lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, told Reuters that a second full trial, rehashing the evidence a third time, could not be ruled out if the Court of Cassation challenges Thursday’s verdict.
Relatives and lawyers sat in a high-windowed courtroom that has witnessed some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read a list of victims, many of whom shared the same last names.
The black boxes from Flight 447 were recovered in 2011, after two years of deep-sea searches that were nearly called off.
The trial revealed bitter divisions between the airline and the plane maker over the cause of the crash and a gulf between a civil report on the crash that focused primarily on the pilots’ actions and a broader cause-and-effect chain highlighted by the court.
Analysts say the move is unlikely to change regulators’ views on the crash, which did not result in major technical changes. French BEA investigators discovered that the plane’s crew had pushed their plane into a stall, cutting lift under the wings, after mishandling a problem with icy sensors.
Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures within the aircraft manufacturer and the airline. These included poor training and failure to follow up on previous sensor faults.
To prove manslaughter, prosecutors had to not only establish negligence, but also put the threads together to demonstrate how it caused the accident. Their inability to make this part of the argument stand had resulted in an earlier acquittal.
Lamy said the deceased pilots had been “rehabilitated”.
